Expelled chief justice runs for governor

Commandments case could become issue in Alabama GOP's primary campaign in 2006

PHILLIP RAWLS, Associated Press

Published
5:30 am CDT, Tuesday, October 4, 2005

GADSDEN, ALA. - Roy Moore, who became a hero to the religious right after being ousted as Alabama's chief justice for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse, announced Monday that he is running for governor in 2006.

Moore's candidacy could set up a showdown with Gov. Bob Riley, a fellow Republican, and turn the Ten Commandments dispute into a central campaign issue in this Bible Belt state.

Moore, 58, said that if elected, he has no plans to relocate the Ten Commandments monument from its new home at a church in Gadsden.

In 2000, Alabama voters elected Moore as chief justice of the state Supreme Court, and the next summer he had a 5,300-pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments installed in the rotunda of the state judicial building.

A federal judge ordered Moore to remove it as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion, but Moore refused.

His fellow justices had the monument moved to a storage site out of public view.

And in November 2003, a state judicial court kicked Moore out of office for defying the federal court.

Moore took his appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost them at every level.